A common refrain is that the Iraq War is a “war of choice.” Or course, all wars are wars of choice. The early Americans could have decided to remain part of England with all the restrictions on liberty that would have meant and war could have been avoided. The Union could have accepted the secession of the Confederate states and avoided war. The South could have accepted gradually increasing restrictions on slavery and avoided war. Despite any provocation, one can always choose acquiescence, loss of liberty, or even loss of life over war. When some say that Iraq is a war of choice they mean to say that the negative consequence of not going to war are less than the negative consequences of war.
People can certainly make that judgment. It is clear that had the US known more precisely the level of weapon of mass destruction development in Iraq, the calculus of the decision would have been different.
Defeat can be an inevitable consequence of war, but it also become a considered and deliberate choice. Indeed, some Democrats have cornered themselves into a position that good news in Iraq becomes a political liability. According to the Washington Post, Democratic Representative James Clyburn, the House Minority Whip, warned that “We, by and large, would be wise to wait on the [Petraeus ] report [on the progress of the surge.” He, nonetheless, conceded that a positive report on Iraq, “a real big problem for us.”
Now, we can be sure that in his heart-of-hearts Clyburn wants the best for the US and US troops. However, if one’s political circumstances depend on bad news there is a natural human tendency to gravitate to such news. That is why the recent improvement in security in Iraq has not occasioned relief by Democrats but rather increased their concern about the lack of political progress in Iraq.
Sometimes, choosing defeat can come by accident as in the recent remarks by Republican Senator John Warner. He was trying to offer the argument that perhaps the US should use troop levels to put pressure of Iraqi officials to more aggressively to pursue political reconciliation. Warner’s mistake was to suggest that 5,000 troops be withdrawn to indicate that the American military commitment is not open-ended.
The idea was ill-conceived in many respects. The troop withdrawal is too little to have the desired effect. If it were large enough to signal a significant withdrawal, the withdrawal would undermine the surge with seems to been gaining traction on the security front. Certainly, given the political situation in the US, Iraqis already understand that they cannot count on support from the US past January 2009.
Moreover, Warner should have understood that his suggestion would be misinterpreted and trumpeting in headlines an influential Senator calling for troop withdrawal. Warner’s remarks would be viewed as Warner defecting from the Bush camp.
Warner’s too idle a suggestion masked the fact that Warner has confirmed that he would vote against any imposed timetable for withdrawal. You see the Democrats don’t want the US in Iraq and want a full-fledged withdrawal to begin in Bush Administration so that Democrats will not be blamed for choosing defeat. Warner’s mistake played into this plan.
Some Democrats speak of measured withdrawal, but once significant withdrawals begin, Democrats do not have the rhetorical ammunition to slow the momentum and prevent the rapid abandonment of Iraq to Iran and Al Qaeda.
In Vietnam, the security situation was manageable in 1973 and an agreement to cease hostilities in the Paris Peace Accords was reached. Of course, the North Vietnamese ignored the agreement. By 1975, the Democratically controlled Congress refused to provide military aid to South Vietnam and North Vietnam (amply armed by their sponsors) rolled their tanks into Hanoi in 1975. The Democrats had so demonized the war, that no will remained to support an ally that had been attacked in violation of the Paris Peace Accords.
Unfortunate Credulity
Sunday, August 12th, 2007The late astronomer Carl Sagan would deal with UFO sitings or super natural claims that appeared to violate physical laws with the aphorism that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Given that physical laws have be validated and re-validated and that many phenomena could be mistaken for alien spacecraft, if an individual wants to dispute conventional wisdom, he or she has the burden of proof and that burden increases with singularly of the claim.
It is also true that most people operate from established world views in realms of inquiry far less certain than science. Everyone maintains a certain internal narrative about how the world works. Information that conforms with the narrative is granted credence with little or evidence. While those tales that tend to contradict our narratives are subject more scrutiny. In general, this attribute is a virtue. Otherwise, people would be all sails and no rudder, lurching from one idea to the other buffeted winds of information.
Now The New Republic (TNR) is a reputable left-center journal of politics. Except for a scandal involving fabricated stories from Stephen Glass, the editors have a reputation as serious straight shooters, not given to mendacity or hyperbole. This quality is what makes the current scandal surrounding US Army Private Thomas Beauchamp’s dispatches from the Iraq so problematic. Beauchamp, whose wife works for The New Republic, is an young and aspiring writer who has been sending dispatches from Iraq. In his dispatch “Shock Troops,” Beauchamp asserted that the Iraq War was brutalizing to troops and this had manifested itself in cruel jokes about fellow soldiers who had been burned by IED’s or a Bradley Vehicle driver who passed time running over dogs.
It is certainly true that the abrasions of war can raise life-long callouses on the souls of soldiers. Though the effect of war on people can be alleviated by good leadership and training, it is very reasonable to be concerned about these effects with respect to war in general and this war in particular. Unfortunately, the editors of TNR had already developed a rigid internal narrative critical of the conduct of this war and were thus susceptible to a story that played in tho this bias. It now appears the Beauchamp knew just what resonances to strike to sound credible to TNR editors. The tales of cruelty by American soldiers warped by the Iraq War rang true to TNR editors.
However, to those in the military, the stories from Beauchamp were discordant, and soon legions of Internet fact-checkers found series flaw in Beauchamp’s stories. For example, a Bradley Fighting Vehicle may protect troops, but it is certainly not nimble enough to go dog hunting in. The Army conducted its own investigation and discredited Beauchamp’s claims. According to The Weekly Standard, a Conservative opinion journal, Beauchamp has disavowed his stories.
Ultimately, TNR conducted an investigation and stood by the original story. However, they conceded that the cruel remarks made about an IED victim were not made in Iraq, but in Kuwait before deployment to Iraq. This mistake was not inconsequential. It struck at the fundamental thesis of the article. If you are making the case that war makes people cruel, evidence of people who are mean-spirited before they go to war provides no support to the case.
When the TNR editors were faced with this journalistic scandal, they could choose to be either the prosecutors ruthlessly determined to find how and why they were deceived or defendants making less and less believable claims until their own credibility erodes. They chose the latter. However, we hope that this incident will make the TNR editors sufficiently introspective in the future that they might be able to recognize false information even when in happens to support of their own world view. It is not an easy thing to do, but it is necessary for editors to have such skills.
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